Since the introduction of 2.79 a number of people have been experiencing
intermittent keyboard lockups. The problem happened everytime a tty was
respawned e.g. a modem line running on ttyS0. When a call came in, keyboard
died, if one turned off the modem (AA mode) keyboard died, if one did telinit q,
telinit u, keyboard died. Restarting X11 solved the problem (mouse kept working).
Apparently there is some kind of a race condition for the keyboard.
SOLUTION: Upgrading to sysvinit 2.84 and applying only the patches:
sysvinit-2.77-md5-be.patch
sysvinit-2.78-halt.patch
sysvinit-2.78-md5.patch (remove second hunk as it is already in)
sysvinit-2.78-autofsck.patch
Three of the other patches have been already incorporated into the package
(see ChangeLog).
After installing 2.84 none of the lockups happen anymore and everything is working
as expected.
FYI

I have been waiting to see the upgrade (or downgrade) of the SysVinit-2.79 in
rawhide but so far it is not. 2.79 is buggy as it is mentioned in the later upgrades.
I also looked and no distro is using 2.79 except rawhide. I think we should either
go back to 2.78 or go upto 2.8x. Just a reminder!